(Author's Note: This is an attempted reboot, although I've made some minor changes, to a story called Mark's Morphing Machine that was purged from the Internet in 2016 and only a few bits remain on the Internet Archive. I cannot find any of the contributions I made to it, but I liked the premise of it. It starred Mark, who was a very different character than Jon of You Are What You Wish. I've decided to do an adaptation based on some of the pieces I did locate in the Internet Archive. I'll see if I remember enough to get to where I started in. So, similar scenario, but to distinguish it, I've given our lead character a new name.)
Robert Bosman...or Rob, as everyone called him, seemed to be a typical teenager. Brown hair, brown eyes... he didn't really seem to have much that distinguished him from other teens of his age. He lived in a small city known for a few companies that called it home and a medium sized college. Other than that, it was a fairly nice and usually boring place to live.
Rob, if you asked him, would probably shrug if you asked him to describe himself. Many teenagers would. He was only fifteen, and in the spring of his freshman year of high school. Plenty of time for him to find himself. He didn't feel much pressure though. He was the middle child in his family. He had an older sister a few grades ahead of him in the same school and a younger sister a few grades behind him. His parents weren't divorced, like some of his classmates. Again, a rather typical family.
Therefore, it would have surprised everyone to know that Rob had been chosen for anything at this point in his life. That point was early on a Wednesday morning when his life ceased to be typical. He had just finished getting dressed for school and was gathering his things when the room suddenly filled with a loud buzzing noise, and a shimmering circle of light, about the size of a lunchbox, appeared in the wall of his room. "Robert Bosman?" A voice said, echoing out of the tube.
Rob was a few seconds away from losing control of his bladder, surprised as he was. "Yeah?" He stumbled.
"You are at a critical point in your development. You have potential, but your future has many possibilities." A device shot out of the small portal and into his hands. It looked like an old TV remote control. “You must use this device to change not only the course of your life, but of the future. It has the power to alter reality itself. Only you will be aware of the changes you make. Everyone else will remember the world always having been the way you've transformed it with this device."
"Wha-what am I supposed to do with it?"
"Change things. We cannot give you details. Just know that things must turn out differently or the planet will suffer a great calamity."
Rob didn't think about the fact that him being responsible for saving the world, on the face of it, was a seemingly ludicrous idea. "What? How does it work?" What am I..."
"Just do the best you can.....we need you to..." suddenly, the shimmering portal began to blink out of existence. "No, keep it open," the voice shouted to someone. "We need to tell him about..." And then it vanished.
Rob looked at the device. It had only six buttons, each one labeled in tiny print, almost too small to see. There were three rows of two buttons each. “I guess maybe I should experiment with it a little,” he said to himself. “See if I can figure out how this things works and just what I'm meant to do with it.” He looked at the first two buttons below Undo. One said Personality Swap, the other Body Swap.
